“For
the nonprofit study partners, relationships were identified between
organizational investment in online communications and an
organization’s results. The organizations that invested more
resources into their programs were more successful, in both generating
advocacy activity and raising significant funds online.

For
years many organizations felt that the Internet should be effectively
“free,” but the reality is that successful programs come
with a price. This study found that the most successful organizations
were those with a larger annual online communications budget, more
online communications staff, and a more significant total 5-year
investment in online communications.

There was actually
relatively little relationship between an overall organizational budget
and size and their results. Even very small organizations had
successful online programs if and when resources were invested in their
programs.”

This stuff provided by a chap called Alan Moore from SMLXL in London –
some great quotes to bolster arguments/cases (apologies in advance for
the long post):

“With the ease of access to programming
that computers now have, younger viewers in particular (a commercially
very attractive group) may become increasingly infrequent television
users. There is for example, already evidence that television has lost
young male viewers to computers.”John Ranelagh, Founding Commissioning Editor Channel 4 Television

“77% of Americans seek their primary news today online.”

“The old notion that producers produce and consumers consume is regarded passé by management theorists.”Simon London, Financial Times 27th June 2005

“Jonathan
Schwartz COO of Sun Microsystems believes that the 1000 bloggers at Sun
have done more for his company than a billion $ ad campaign ever could.”

“nobody is as clever as everybody,”

Merrill
Brown, author of a Carnegie Corporation of New York report on media
consumption says, “The future course of news is being altered by
technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news
outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.”

Rupert
Murdoch: “What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution
in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to
rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They
don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them
what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit
further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.”

“4
out of every 5 Americans in 1964 read a paper every day. Today, only
half do. For younger readers the figures are even worse.”

”
[Over the next 10 years audiences will move away from the linear,
scheduled world where relatively limited number of distributors who
push their content at the viewer….] “we will instead enter
a world where content is increasingly delivered through internet-
protocol- based networks that are non-linear, on-demand and entirely
self-scheduled. In that world, the viewer – not the broadcaster
– will decide what is consumed and how.”Lord Currie, Royal Television Society Fleming Memorial Lecture, 2004

“The
biggest story on Thursday was Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that
Internet users around the world freely add to and edit.
Yesterday’s entry on the London bombings was amended, edited and
updated by hundreds of readers no fewer than 2,800 times throughout the
day. The entry has photographs, detailed timelines, contact numbers, a
complete translated statement by the jihadist group claiming
responsibility for the attacks and links to other Wikipedia entries.”Newsweek (July 9,2005)

“Customers
have changed and adapted to this new always on, always connected, media
fragmented world, they seek value by searching, they are not waiting
for you to interrupt them with unwanted messaging, they look to their
peers for voices of authority.They are in effect doing it for themselves.”

“…the notion of mass media is fast becoming an oxymoron.”

Companies need to ask: * How can we support our 21st Century consumers in a real and credible way? * Can we facilitate positive co-creation? * Does our current operational structure allow us to support this? * Are we engaging our audience or are we overly transmitting to them? * Can we deliver a genuine valuable experience across multiple platforms? * Do we have the metrics to support such initiatives? * How can we align everything we do to deliver enhanced customer advocacy? * Can we become a dynamic engaging brand that is true to ourselves and true to our customers? * Can we continue to accept mediocrity?

Jeff Jarvis’s 1st law: “Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.”

1) More features isn’t better, it’s worse. 2) You can’t make things easier by adding to them.3) Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker. 4) Style matters5) Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.6) Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.7) Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use. 8) Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.9) Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience. 10) Less is difficult, that’s why less is more

Research byCap Gemini Ernst and Young
in October 2003 found that 17% of car buyers were influenced by TV ads,
whilst 71% were influenced by word of mouth. And a Nokia Monitor
research project in 2004 found that 49% of mobile buyers were
influenced by word of mouth, whilst crucially the decision-making has
reduced from 6 weeks to 6 days.

And as Tomi Ahonen likes to say,
“In a connected world sharing information is power.”

The increasing penetration of the internet, coupled
with increasingly cheap bandwidth, has become our means to search for
more credible, more authorative sources of information.

“Evidence is building that the paradigm of
marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the
last 50 years of mass media to trust-based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment.”

The internet in many ways is not so much a technology as social phenomenon.

For example, the rise of community rating sites such as Epinions, where you can get marks out of ten from well-being medicines to the latest movies, or the creation of ‘folksonomies’ such as flickr.com., with its social tags system, or travelpost.com,
a community site for those travelling the world, with, as the site
says, “174,238+ unbiased hotel reviews, travel journals, photos
and itineraries.” For unbiased read; co-created, unfiltered,
authentic, more credible.

The social phenomenon of the internet goes further, for example it
extends into blogging, that last year toppled leading media icons like
CBS anchorman Dan Rather or Jason Eason, Chief News Director of CNN, who was forced to resign over remarks he had made at Davos by Rony Abovitz, a blogger and that nearly brought the bicycle lock manufacturer Kryptonite to its knees.

Blogging showcases how enlightened companies have embraced the social phenomenon of the Internet.

Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners,
is a more homegrown example, of one man’s passionate belief that we
should stop feeding our kids junk food in schools, which translated
into the social phenomenon of a community of interest forming around an
issue that cared passionately about what we feed our kids in school. Jamie’s School Dinners motivated people to respond in a number of ways; 230,000 signatures delivered in a petition to 10 Downing Street and the creation of worldwide online forums, via Jamie’s blogsite and an ongoing debate globally about what we feed our kids.

In the corporate world the Boeing Design Team
with 120,000 members is another example of how a corporation has
harnessed the collective intellect of many people who are seriously
interested in aircraft and aviation. These people are spread across the
globe and are constantly in touch with Boeing sharing and discussing
information about the future development of Boeing aircrafts. The maxim
that “nobody is as clever as everybody,” is never truer than here.

Habbo Hotel is the
preferred virtual playground for teenagers from Finland to UK to Japan,
spending on average 40 minutes per session at this internet based
gaming world, where payments are made by mobile phone. Over the past
two years in the UK alone Habbo Hotel has acquired over a million
gamers.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas co-founder of the Big Blog Company
says that the Internet is not a channel, it is what’s causing the
other channels to leak and bleed ‘content’. This will
become more profound as the internet increasingly converges with the
mobile device. It is a valuable insight.

For companies the threat is this:The internet combined with broadband essentially changes everything.
It changes the way customers can access information and changes the way
they use it. It changes the way business can communicate with their
customers and it also changes how a business might go to market. It
changes the linking between channels, that link businesses, customers,
suppliers and employees. It offers opportunity and it offers your once
helpless competitors the chance to radically rethink their business
strategies and attack vital parts of your business model.

“What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution
in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to
rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They
don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them
what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit
further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.“

Murdoch states that where four out of every five Americans in 1964
read a paper every day, today, only half do. For younger readers the
figures are even worse.

So what happened to 18-24 year olds usage of traditional media like TV and newspapers? The answer is they are early adopters of new media. New media includes:

the internet

picture phones

instant messaging

blogging

cell phones

MP3 players

satellite radio

text messaging

TiVo/Replay

broadband TV and web radio.

But its not only the news industry that is feeling the pre-tremors of
the volcanic eruption that technology is about to unleash, as Lord Currie
described it in a Royal Television Society Fleming Memorial Lecture in
2004. He believes that over the next 10 years audiences will move away
from the linear, scheduled world where relatively limited number of
distributors who push their content at the viewer…. “we
will instead enter a world where content is increasingly delivered
through internet-protocol-based networks that are non-linear, on-demand
and entirely self-scheduled. In that world, the viewer – not the
broadcaster – will decide what is consumed and how.”

BT’s announcement in July 2005 that it is to launch an IPTV channel in conjunction with Microsoft demonstrates exactly what Lord Currie means as technology goes up though the gears.

IPTV aggregates and amplifies this fundamental change in how we,
collect, edit and consume information or content and share it with our
friends.

That is why MTV have recently launched 2 broadband channels whilst
AOL has created a partnered multimedia production company that will
accelerate its live entertainment events online, as well as for TV,
cell phones and other media platforms.

The internet + broadband has put the “me” into media, and Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine
describes traditional mass media channels as cold media, whereas,
community sites like wikipedia, blogs, commercial online enterprises
like ebay, Amazon etc., are what he describes are hot media.

Vital, emergent, with two way flows of communication, the connection of many-to-many – social media.

To put this in context, last July’s tragic bombings in London
demonstrated how far we have come in how we collect, share, create, and
disseminate information. Newsweek (July 9,2005) describes the most
dramatic example of this,

“The biggest story on Thursday was Wikipedia, the
online encyclopedia that Internet users around the world freely add to
and edit. Yesterday’s entry on the London bombings was amended, edited and updated by hundreds of readers no fewer than 2,800 times throughout the day.

The entry has photographs,
detailed timelines, contact numbers, a complete translated statement by
the jihadist group claiming responsibility for the attacks and links to
other Wikipedia entries.“

The first video pictures broadcast from CNN came from a citizen journalist, as did many images broadcast by the BBC.

The BBC is no slouch these days has understood the implications for its organization. And has for example taken a “pioneering new approach to public access rights in digital age.” For example The Creative Archive Project. The project will allow British residents to download clips of BBC factual programmes from bbc.co.uk
for non-commercial use, keep them on their PCs, manipulate and share
them, thereby making the BBC archives more accessible to licence-fee
payers. In the next, pilot phase of the project the Creative Archive will make 100 hours of BBC content available.

To see how connected communities are generating a paradigm shift in how
businesses can connect and co-create value with their audiences, we
look to Korea and the online newspaper, OhMyNews.
OhMyNews is the third largest newspaper in Korea, but the important
part is that it has 26,000 citizen reporters that contribute to the
newspaper. Get your story published and you receive $20 USD and your
name in print.

Founder and Editor Oh Yeon-ho said in an interview with Wired Magazine “With
OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where
people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative
media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put
everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves.”

The Guardian
(who has its own blog) has described it as the world’s most
domestically powerful news site and, a South Korean diplomat was quoted
as saying that no policy maker can now ignore OhMyNews.

Ebay, Yahoo Social Search, SMS messaging and Skype
in telecoms, music file sharing, Wikipedia and OhMyNews all show how
enabling or capturing peer-to-peer information flows can transform
business models. Companies need to understand that today value lies
with the consumer not the other way round.

And Simon London writing for the Financial Times Monday 27th June 2005, said,

“In business as in art, we live in a
postmodern era. Old certainties are being demolished and relationships
redefined. Everything you thought about business has been upended. The
relationship between companies and customers is no exception. The old
notion that producers produce and consumers consume is regarded
passé by management theorists.”

Peer-to-peer communication is the life force of communities
– the rapid emergence and convergence of the mobile phone and the
internet means that we suddenly have access to our peers, our friends,
our colleagues and family members. And like search that is changing
peoples habits and attitudes. We are getting used to living in a
connected age where we naturally draw on our participation in various
networks for assistance information and support.

The problem for businesses and marketers is that traditional marketing has become in the eyes of everyday people, adversarial.

Customers have changed and adapted to this new
always on, always connected, media fragmented world, they seek value by
searching, they are not waiting for you to interrupt them with unwanted
messaging, they look to their peers for voices of authority.

They are in effect doing it for themselves.

Shoshana Zuboff, in her book “The support economy” Penguin 2002, said,
“In today’s market, supporting end consumers is not an occasional event, but a necessary condition of being in business.”

Some companies are responding to consumer power by pushing harder down more channels using traditional marketing methods.

But you can no longer take one way broadcast or a monopoly approach
into a consumer empowered world. Because the internet and increasingly
the mobile phone has fundamentally changed this.

The harsh reality for all businesses today is that they need to change they way they think about marketing and marketing communication strategies.

Thus my first law, once again: Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.”

All marketing interaction should deliver an experience that actively and positively links customers, media and brand in relevant and meaningful ways. Brand experience replaces broadcasting in its broadest sense.

Successful brands today are:

Life Enabling

Life Simplifying

Navigational.

Set those as your guiding principles.

And finally a word from Glen L. Urban who writes:
“As
customer power grows, innovative companies are moving beyond
traditional push marketing and customer relationship management to
become full proponents of the customer agenda.“(source: Glen L. Urban. The Emerging Era of Customer Advocacy. 2004)

Amen to that.

About the author:Alan Moore is the CEO of SMLXL
a next-generation creative marketing company, focused on enabling
businesses and brands to engage with their audiences and succeed in the
21st Century.

Alan Moore is also the author of Communities Dominate Branding,
a new book co-authored with Tomi T. Ahonen. “Communities Dominate
Branding: Business and marketing challenges for the 21st century” is a
book about how the new phenomenon of digitally connected communities is
emerging as a force to counterbalance the power of the big brands and
advertising.

In the talk I spoke about how Web 2.0 companies distinguish themselves by leveraging the network of which they are a part. Brittanica, for example, has had a web site for quite some time and were slow to leverage the network in any particular way. Wikipedia,
on the other hand, exists only because they used the available network
to improve their contents communally. And Wikipedia, of course, is a
much, much more popular site.

As in my last talk: Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us
(which includes a podcast), I started down the road toward Web 2.0 from
the standpoint of those Web companies who have excelled: Google, Yahoo,
Amazon, and eBay. They obviously know more about succeeding online than
anybody else, and have become so successful so fast that we often take
them for granted, even though they are barely a decade old. So, I find
it particularly useful to ask: What makes them so special? What have
they done that others haven’t? And I find myself coming back to the
same answer over and over: they know how to leverage the network.
From Google’s pagerank algorithm to the APIs of eBay and Amazon to the
movie ratings on Yahoo, these companies know how to harness the
collective activity and intelligence of people to make their services
better.

For those who want only the quick and dirty (without the pretty pictures), here are the talking points:

The home page is no longer the most important page on your site.

The information architecture that people use to find your content is, increasingly, not yours.

Each feature added to an application is more to think about – for everyone.

Folksonomies are a way for users to map their own, familiar vocabulary to your alien one.

Words are the currency of the Web. Spend the most time on your words.

Seducible moments are those increasingly rare moments when you can talk to your users in an appropriate context.

Recommendation systems are a forced move.

Users want control.

Users appreciate tools that help them make their own well-informed decisions.

The best software models human behavior.

Links model how users value content, and are only the start…

Sometimes it is easier to design for yourself than others.

There is always an opportunity for a better interface to data.

All things being equal, faster interfaces allow for more innovation.

Most people are willing to trade their personal information for good service.

As choices grow, so does the importance of learnability.

Redesigns are dead.

Network effects are rare, and killer.

Network effects work in the opposite way for teams building software.

Personal value precedes network value

People rarely do things for the “good of the network”

Del.icio.us, though providing very cool tagging features, is mostly about a single person remembering items for later.

“The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous”

Deadly Web Analytics Sin #2: Search Term Popularity
Popularity matters if you’re a teenager or a drama queen. But your
search terms shouldn’t be subject to a popularity contest. Why? Because
it’s the quality of the search term that matters, not the quantity of
times it drives traffic to your site.

So let’s define quality. In the world of marketing and web analytics,
quality means the likelihood of a prospect becoming a customer. Whether
it’s a trial download, sale or lead generation, we want to know what
makes customers likely to buy so that we can work to encourage that
behavior and replicate it elsewhere.

Judging Popularity is Straightforward
Popular search terms are no exception to the rule and are easy to spot
when performing site analysis. Note the blue shading in the example
below. It helps distinguish the relative popularity of the same term
across different search engines and directories, which is useful. From
this we can begin to understand the how different search engine users
behave differently.

How Do We Determine a Quality Search Term?
Instinctively, the first place we look for quality is the amount of
revenue generated by each keyword. However, this metric is a blunt
instrument with a too-hard line that delineates success from failure.
Two factors reduce it’s usefulness in determining the visitor’s
likelihood to buy: cookie deletion and latent conversions.

Setting a cookie is an absolute must for tracking ROI, but they’re only
useful while they live on the client’s machine. If the user deletes the
cookie, the conversion data become invisible. First-party cookies are
the way to go, as they aren’t usually blocked by anti-virus software.

Latency or latent conversions occur when a user comes into your site
via search, receives a cookie, looks around for a while, leaves and
then returns sometime in the future making a purchase. While the
keyword eventually gets the credit for triggering a sale, you’re flying
blind for 30 or 60 days or more, depending on your sales cycle. In
essence, you’re spending valuable PPC dollars while you wait for ROI.

Time is on Our Side
Yes, it is… (Sorry, I love this next topic enough to sing about it.)

One of my favorite metrics is Average Time on Site (ATOS). This
metric speaks to the fact that web users just don’t waste their time on
a site that doesn’t interest them. There are hundreds–even thousands
of other sites just a click away in the search results if the one they
click on doesn’t meet their needs. The screen shot below shows ATOS by
term and search engine.

Therefore one can deduce that the longer the visit length, the greater
the interest in the products or services offered. I should point out
that ATOS is not meaningful in absolute terms or across different
sites. Only use this metric within the same site for different search
terms or segments. Think of it like this: You can almost say that your
visitors are voting with every action they perform, including leaving.
Web analytics simply tallies the votes and exposes preferences.

ATOS helps solve ROI problems because it’s not cookie-dependent, and
there is no latency; you have data within hours of a campaign going
live. ATOS closely correlates to the probability of prospects becoming
customers which is all we need to make smart marketing decisions.

A Final Thought: Short VisitsWhen you find search terms that
have a Short Average Time on Site compared to others, your first
reaction might be to eliminate that keyword from your PPC campaigns.
But before you go and do something rash, you should also check the page
on your site that visitors see immediately after using that keyword…
does it correlate to the search term they used? Do a quick scan of the
text and determine if you’re meeting the needs of these visitors.

This screen shot shows the correlation of search terms to content on a specific page.

Here’s to the clueless ones.“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki

Cluelessness is underrated. It’s the newbie who does
something he didn’t know was supposed to be impossible. It’s the naive
guy asking the one dumb question any clued-in person would diss. And
it’s that question that leads to the answer no expert would have found.

The clueless accomplish amazing things–not necessarily because
we’re bold, brilliant innovators, but perhaps because we just don’t
know any better. We see the simplicity of the forest while Those Who
Know are overanalyzing the complex subtleties of the trees (and miss
the point). Sometimes NOT knowing about a “problem” weakens (or
eliminates) it.

Perception is a powerful tool. Believing there’s a limitation can sometimes create
that limitation. And for the clueless who don’t know about the
limitation, well, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. Belief matters. Not
everywhere, not in everything, but more than we give credence to.

And it doesn’t take any new-age/self-help foofiness to explain it.
This is not about “the power of positive thinking.” You probably all
know the story of Roger Bannister–prior
to 1954, experts believed that running a mile in less than four minutes
was beyond human capability. People assumed it was an insurmountable
human limitation–not possible. Some believed that even if you could, your heart would explode. But in 1954, Bannister broke the four-minute-impossible-barrier and clicked in at 3:59.4.

That was cool, but the remarkable thing is what happened immediately after that. Just over a month later someone else did it, and then before too long a ton of people were doing the “impossible” sub-four-minute mile. The real barrier was psychological.

In this case, Bannister wasn’t clueless. He believed in his
training. But I think it still demonstrates the point. The people who
broke the record after Bannister were essentially the same as
people who’d always been clueless about the “impossible” limit.
If–prior to Bannister’s run–some of them had missed the memo on the
whole heart-exploding thing, chances are the record would have fallen
sooner.

Part of the charm of cluelessness is that you approach things with a hopeful perspective, trying to figure out how
to do the I’m-too-clueless-to-know-it-cannot-be-done thing, rather than
accepting the “reality”. Often, by the time you learn you can’t do it, your response might be “Oops! You mean this thing I just did?”

Example: a group of seven middle school girls from Petaluma,
California–12 to 14–year olds, accomplished something that everybody
said was impossible. They fought city hall and won. They
created a business proposal, refused to be derailed, and after several
YEARS of work pushed through a multi-million dollar project that the
best commercial developers in the state hadn’t been able to pull off.
These young girls simply didn’t know that you just can’t DO that…
especially if you aren’t old enough to drive. Their story is one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever heard.

As a poster child for cluelessness, I have many clueless experiences
I treasure. The Head First book series would most likely never have
happened if we’d had a clue about the tech book publishing world. Our
cluelessness is the only explanation we have for why two unknown
non-authors (who knew zero about publishing) went forward with
something so strange. “If books like that would sell,” the seasoned publishers told us, “Trust us, someone would have done it by now.” (If I had a dime for everytime I heard that
one, I wouldn’t need royalties to pay the rent.) The ultra-experienced,
it seemed, were blinded by their certainty of “the way things work.” In
other words, they knew it wasn’t worth the risk, and had no reason to revisit their assumptions.

Yes, I recognize that it’s ridiculous to equate “cluelessness” with “beginner’s mind”. Or is it? What if “clueless” is simply a label the glass-half-empty folks give the glass-half-full folks. If we’re optimistic,
we must not have a clue. What if we simply see the world through a
different lens? A lens that opens doors and windows the cynical and
pessimistic are too busy dissing to notice?

Mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said,“The ‘silly question’ is the first intimation of some totally new development.”